Member Meeting: Trenton Baylor, sculptor

Join us for the first member meeting of 2017 featuring Trenton Baylor, UW Parkside Associate Professor of Art and Sculpture.

Trenton Baylor’s Artist Statement:

My work is inspired by both young seedlings growing in the backyard and machinery that hums, rumbles, shifts, and glides. I developed a love of nature as a young boy while helping my mother in her garden and I am certain that the many trips South in the passenger seat of my father’s semi-truck account for my interest in machinery. It has been these experiences throughout the years that have become the theme and formal aesthetic of my art. As an aesthetic element, nature is alluded to in the surface coloration, form, organic transitions, and natural materials. In contrast, the use of machine-made parts, polished surfaces, steel, aluminum, and hard edges connote the mechanical. In combination these two opposing forces fight and compliment each other in a way that requires a delicate balance.

Over the years I have created works in various mediums, most of which incorporate fragments of those experiences which molded me as well as the findings of more recent discoveries. I assuredly will continue to experiment with painting, printmaking, and drawing, but it is through sculpture that I have been successful in combining my ideas of nature and machine together into visual expression.